Azure Search

Uncover latent insights from all of your content

Azure Search is the only cloud search service with built-in artificial intelligence (AI) capabilities that enrich all types of information to easily identify and explore relevant content at scale. It uses the same integrated Microsoft natural language stack that Bing and Office have used for more than a decade, and prebuilt AI APIs across vision, language and speech. Spend more time innovating and less time maintaining a complex cloud search solution.

Import data from popular Azure Stores, or ingest from other sources via Push API

Index or query test your data

Manage in the Azure portal or with .NET SDK and REST APIs

Scale your search service as storage and performance needs fluctuate

Start, maintain and scale with minimal investment

Deploy a search index quickly and avoid operational maintenance. This fully managed cloud search service reduces the complexity of data ingestion and index creation by integrating with popular Azure storage solutions and offering index functionality exposed through a simple REST API or .NET SDK. Deploy a fully configured search service with intuitive user experiences such as scoring, faceting, suggestions, synonyms and geo-search – all while avoiding the operational overhead needed to debug index corruption, monitor service availability or manually scale during traffic fluctuations.

Create searchable content using pretrained AI models

Take advantage of pretrained speech, vision and language models that transform raw, unstructured information into searchable content. Using the cognitive search feature, create enrichment pipelines that use built-in AI APIs to bring structure to your data before it gets indexed, either programmatically or while staying in the Azure Search portal. Applying AI capabilities such as OCR, key phrase extraction, location, people and organisation detection is as simple as ticking a box in the Azure Search portal.

Get the power, control and customisation you need with flexible pricing

Azure Search is available in combinable search units that include reliable storage and throughput to set up and scale a cloud search experience quickly and cost effectively. Add search units to increase queries per second, to enable high availability or for faster data ingestion. Remove search units during low traffic periods.

Not available

Free

Basic

Standard

Storage optimised

Best for

Estimating a projected index size and capacity planning.

Running workloads requiring light compute and storage requirements.

Most workloads, offering a balance of compute, memory and storage.

Running workloads with high volumes of data cost effectively when you need less memory and compute.

Documentation and training

Developer documentation

Learn how to consolidate searchable content into a single fast index for a broad range of scenarios, see how to extract and enrich content using AI-powered algorithms with cognitive search resources and sample data, or learn more about cognitive search in Azure Search.

Frequently asked questions about Azure Search

Built-in indexers are available for Azure Cosmos DB, Azure SQL Database, Azure Blob Storage and SQL Server hosted in an Azure VM. Use Azure Data Factory, with more than 80 connectors, or Azure Logic Apps to connect to your data source. Alternatively, push data into an Azure Search index, which has no restrictions on data source type.

Azure Search is a platform as a service that helps developers create their own cloud search solutions. Microsoft Search uses Azure Search technology to offer software as a service for enterprise search within Microsoft products.